User blog:Slivicon/Project Update
I'd like to thank the people who continue to freely contribute their time and effort to improving and expanding the Wiki here. I just wanted to write a quick update on what's been happening lately. Work continues on various projects, so be sure to read about them and get involved to move them forward. One major project that has been approved and is gradually making progress is the Raid Project. This is probably one of the most challenging right now and I am really pleased that people are jumping on board to work on it. The challenges have a lot to do with trying to re-vamp these popular pages in a way that makes them more accessible, more consistent and easier to maintain. In order to do that, the project has incorporated new ideas for things like splitting Player Deck contributions into tiers which have degrees of accessibility with regards to the cards in the decks. Unfortunately due to RL, my own time has been very limited and I have yet to start on some of the other big changes mentioned in the project, which include for all pages belonging to a particular raid, as well as new and improved templates to replace the old, hopefully introducing new functionality we can leverage to lower the maintenance requirement for these pages, as well as to help produce consistent article architecture for each raid. Some of you may have noticed a lot of changes were made to mission pages from a recently completed large project that replaced a great deal of static content with dynamic content generated with a combination of and . While on one hand this reduces the ability for people new to Wikis to easily contribute edits directly to articles, it does massively reduce the amount of maintenance required to keep the pages up to date as well as add new content within those areas. We've really been pushing these dynamic features because with only a handful of dedicated editors and thousands of pages, the maintenance cost in time and effort is monumental. Using these advanced features allows the maintenance cost to be drastically reduced. This is another reason why we have been promoting more and more use of , as they allow pretty much anyone to contribute content without having to learn about templates, dpl and other such things. The basic rules for talk pages are sign your edits (as it shows you how to do that at the top of the edit box when you edit a talk page) and be constructive. Other editors that are more familiar with the Wiki projects and standards will more than likely move useful content from talk pages into the main articles, leaving a note behind about where the content was moved. This is often a good way to get new content incorporated into the Wiki in a way that conforms to the rules set out by projects, standards and templates built here. If you're an anonymous contributor, I'd really like to encourage you to create an account and continue contributing. Creating an account allows links to be made back to your user page from your contributions with many of our templates and also allows you to have a vote within talk pages on projects and standards. A final note is on War Metal. I have not used Facebook for a few years now, so I am not a player and am not very familiar with the game. I do know that the War Metal side of the Wiki needs War Metal players to take the lead on building, updating and improving content, creating projects and standards, etc. If you are a War Metal player, I really encourage you to jump in to that side of the Wiki as I know it needs dedicated help. If you're thinking of contributing but don't know where to start or what to do, read how to get started here. Category:Blog posts